Flownex has released version 6.9 of their Flownex systems CFD software that enables users to perform detail design, analysis and optimization of a wide range of thermal-fluid systems ranging from simple pipe networks to complex systems such as gas turbine engines or combined cycle power plants.

Flownex 6.9 features several enhancements including dynamically generated input pages allowing for group editing of components, the ability to generate intermediate results during transients, the ability to generate restart sets when including an advanced reactor model and many more.

Please visit www.flownex.com for more info as well as a fully functional demo that can be downloaded.

In Trends in Design Analysis, Mike Hudspeth describes the growing use of design analysis and how it has positively affected product quality.

Nowadays, things are much easier. The hours are still long, but the coffee is much better. Product development happens practically overnight. Schedules are tight, but the job gets done because you have tools that let you do what no one ever dreamed could be done. Part of what makes it worth your while to build exacting 3D computer models is what you can do with them. They're not just pretty pictures anymore.

In the Desktop Engineering article "Going Parallel the New Way", Ilya Mirman describes how desktop software such as Excel and Matlab can be used to solve complex problems traditionally solved using low level programming languages, such as, FORTRAN or C.

...parallel programming is difficult and the "software gap" that exists between new hardware capabilities and actual benefits from programming is wide and growing. There is a dearth of applications available for parallel computers, and custom development of parallel applications today is fundamentally flawed.

Clark-Koch, a leading petrochemical company based in Brazil, recently purchased CEI’s EnSight to visualize CFD results, and is using free EnLiten software for marketing to current and prospective customers. The sale was made by Engineering Simulation and Scientific Software (ESSS), CEI’s South American distributor and Brazil’s leading supplier of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element analysis (FEA) solutions.

“EnSight’s superior animation capabilities make it the perfect choice for the work we are doing to develop innovative systems for gas-liquid and liquid-liquid separation,” says Nelson Clark, director of Clark-Koch. “A major bonus for us is the ability to embed EnLiten scenarios, which allows us to market our products through sophisticated 3D animations, printed pieces and PowerPoint presentations.”

A new study from the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL) provides guidelines, recommendations and best practices for the practical application of computational fluid dynamics to the modeling of smoke movement in enclosed spaces. HSL modeled three realistic fire safety engineering cases: a subway station, an accommodation module on an offshore platform, and a high-rise building under construction. Aspects of the modeling process — including the computational grid, the discretization scheme and the turbulence model — were varied for each scenario, and the resulting predictions of smoke transport were compared.

In this one-hour session we will present several customer examples of process automation via the customization of the FloWizard interface and GAMBIT meshing. We will describe the benefits of how the customization of the interface, meshing, solution processes and postprocessing can impact an overall development process. We will also conduct a general overview of the methods utilized in the example customizations.